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The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Monthly Archives: September 2015

McMillan’s Codex #6: Bloodborne

30 Wednesday Sep 2015

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H.P. Lovecraft

McMillan’s Codex #6 By C.T. McMillan

 Bloodborne

It is not often cult authors like H.P. Lovecraft receive such a following in today’s world. His stories of cosmic horror and beings so incomprehensible they drive men insane have captivated young and old readers a like. Over the years entertainment media has used Lovecraft as an inspiration with varying degrees of success. The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness, Prometheus, and even Pacific Rim are good movie examples, while videogames struggle to embrace Lovecraft beyond clever references. Game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, however, took the challenge and made Bloodborne.

Bloodborne 1

Miyazaki is known for the Souls series, action RPGs renowned for their difficulty. Each game is a spiritual successor to the other, and Bloodborne is no different. Even the animations and story telling are the same, with the exception of its combat.   Bloodborne is a fast character action game with an emphasis on offense. The player is encouraged to attack due to the lack of a defensive option and you can only regain health by attacking. Along with the fast combat are aspects of role playing that allow you to level up and build a character suited to your play style by gaining points called blood echoes.

The world and its mechanics are designed around a combination of cosmic and body horror. As per Lovecraft, the world slowly goes insane and undergoes a transformation. A staple of body horror is what you cannot see is affecting you on the inside. In the story, a plague is turning people into monsters and forces unseen twist flesh into grotesque abominations. Mosquito-men hover on buzzing wings, human enemies suddenly sprout snakes from their heads, and animated piles of corpses drip and ooze grime as they crawl. It is implied the player is infected with the plague and sets out on a journey to find a cure.

Bloodborne can be enjoyed on aesthetics alone with its mix of gothic and Victorian styled architecture. Pointed spires atop cathedral-esque buildings reach into the perpetually night sky, streets and alleys fold in on each other as they descend deeper towards the depths, and statues line walkways and bridges. As the game progresses the aesthetic becomes as morphed and grotesque as the enemies. Statues turn into monstrous beings and on the walls of buildings effigies of people stare out in frozen horror as if absorbed by the masonry. The game’s tone is also reflective of the style. After men of science tamper with powers unknown, madness and plague consume the world on an apocalyptic scale. As a Hunter, it is your job to right the wrongs and expunge the monsters to bring light to the darkness.

Bloodborne 2

The religion of Bloodborne is very much inspired by the Cthulhu mythos. The gods, known as Great Ones, are inter-dimensional aliens whose influence is inescapable and omniscient. The Healing Church, the in-game ecclesia, worships the Great Ones and conducts experiments on ordinary people to be closer to them. The town in which they are located, Central Yharnam, is a parallel to Innsmouth, rife with crazed fanatics. In their pursuit of seeking their gods’ wisdom, disciples of the Church are driven mad and it is believed they might have caused the plague. The Hunters are a response to the Church and it is alleged they were created by the Great Ones to put a stop to their activities.

Some of the bosses bear a direct resemblance to Lovecraft’s infamous creatures. Ebrietas is similar to Yog-Sothoth, a mass of tentacles with wings and a bristled mouth that shows a portal to the cosmos. Throughout the game the protagonist gains an item called Madman’s Knowledge that when consumed, reveals giant multi-armed Amygdala monsters clinging to the game’s buildings. Amygdala has a lot in common with Cthulhu with its beard of tentacles on a face of many eyes. Mergo’s Wet Nurse is less obvious about its inspiration, wearing cloth over its body and arms. Its face is uncovered but invisible, creating a sense it is too otherworldly to comprehend.

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Bloodborne is a game Lovecraft fans will enjoy. Though no directly based on his work, it was certainly inspired. From the fully realized world of death and decay, to the slow encroaching madness that seeks to consume it, never has cosmic horror been faithfully applied in a videogame. Hidetaka Miyazaki knew better than anyone how to do Lovecraft right and exceeded all expectations. If you can adapt to the difficulty, it is worth getting used to dying few dozen times.

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Charles McMillan

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

Episode 172: Michele Roldán Shaw!

26 Saturday Sep 2015

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Michele Roldán Shaw, Nancy Caronia, The Kerouac House

Episode 172 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk to chronicler of the rambling life, Michele Roldán Shaw,

Photo by Pressly Hall Giltner Photography.

Photo by Pressly Hall Giltner Photography.

plus Nancy Caronia reads her essay, “Deserving Angels.”

Nancy Caronia

 NOTES

Check out the sweet swag in The Drunken Odyssey‘s fundraiser here.

Tom Lucas Sporting a TDO T-shirtCheck out these Burrow Press events. Literary Death Match will be judged by Billy Collins.

fund-slideSaturday October 3rd  |  Functionally Literate Presents:

PADGETT POWELL  |  REBECCA EVANHOE  |  BETH McKEE
Lowndes Shakespeare Center  |  812 E. Rollins Street
7pm  |  FREE  |  No ticket necessary.

Wednesday October 7th  |  Literary Death Match Presents:

ERICA DAWSON  |  DAVID JAMES POISSANT
KRISTIN HARMEL  |  KRISTEN ARNETT
Mad Cow Theatre  |  54 W. Church Street, 2nd Floor
Doors at 7pm  |  Show at 8pm
$12 pre-sale  |  $15 at the door.

_______

Episode 172 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #105: The Substitute 3

25 Friday Sep 2015

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Jeffrey Shuster, The Curator of Schlock, The Substitute 3

The Curator of Schlock #105 by Jeff Shuster

The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All

There’s no substitute for Treat Williams. Yeah, we’re stuck with him again!

kinopoisk.ru

Look, I like Treat Williams. I just don’t know that he was the best pick to play a hardcore mercenary turned high school teacher. How many hardcore mercenary turned high school teachers have you met in your life, Mr. Curator? Well, I’ve met three and they all resembled Tom Berenger, so I don’t want to hear it! Anyway, we continue Back to School Month with The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All from director Robert Radler, if that is his real name.

I have to give credit where credit is due. The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All is a mean movie where mean people do mean things to each other. Treat Williams returns to the role of Karl Tomasson…that’s an odd last name. Is it Nordic? Son of Tomas? Anyway, the movie starts out with Tomasson being held prisoner by some of Slobodan Milošević’s goons. His mercenary partner is beaten into paralysis below the neck so Tomasson suffocates him to death as any good friend would, kills the guards, and skips back to the United States to deliver the guy’s necklace or Medal of Honor or something to that effect to the man’s daughter.

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It turns out his friend’s daughter teaches English Literature to a college football team named the Rams. They’re kind of rude in her classroom. They toss the football around when they should be paying attention to the lesson about Thomas Wolfe. She says they’re going to fail the course, which results her getting assaulted after hours by the team and sent to the hospital.

Here’s what I don’t get? Why is this delinquent football team even showing up to class? They don’t want to be there, so why not just intimidate the teacher into keeping their attendance in addition to passing them? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say their attendance is just an excuse to let Tomasson play the role of English Professor. Apparently, he has a Doctorate in Contemporary American Literature.

S3D

Ha! He tussles with one of the football players in class when a discussion of Graham Green’s The Quiet American falls on deaf ears. Tomasson comes to the conclusion that the football team is on steroids

S3E

Tomasson has his own team this time around. There’s a guy with a ninja sword and another guy that gorges himself on M&M cookies. I don’t know which is more disgusting, the one mercenary who chops arms off with a ninja sword or the other mercenary who slobbers his cookies with split before downing them. That’s what milk’s for!

Claudia Christian plays a mercenary named Andy who Tomasson sends undercover to a wannabe Hooters restaurant so they can find the connection between the evil football team and their connection to the mob.

S3C

Tomasson and the cookie monster have her under video surveillance during a wet t-shirt conference. Seeing Treat Williams and some sweaty guy shoving spit-laden M&M cookies in his mouth while they comment on silicone breast being splashed with water in a van that looks like it belongs to a serial killer is not my idea of a good time. The sacrifices I make for this blog!

5 Things I Learned from The Substitute 3: Winner Takes All

  1. Steroids shrink your testicles.
  2. Steroids give you an inflated ego.
  3. Weights can kill!
  4. Eyeglass lenses can kill!
  5. Cars can kill you especially when Treat Williams is behind the wheel and pinning you to a warehouse wall while he steps on the gas.

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Jeffrey Shuster 3

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

McMillan’s Codex #5: The Last of Us

23 Wednesday Sep 2015

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cormac mccarthy, The Last of Us, The Road, The Walking Dead

McMillan’s Codex #5 By C.T. McMillan

The Last of Us

Conveying emotion in videogames is difficult. Taken at face value they are toys, superficial things that do not require deep thought or examination outside of times in which players want to escape reality. The fun factor alone makes most games worth the purchase, but some developers make a conscious effort to do more. Naught Dog, a company known for platform adventurers, went outside their usual haunt to make a game unlike any other: The Last of Us.

The Last of Us 1Employing classic survival horror elements, Last of Us puts players in an environment where choice and resources are vital to success. It is possible to complete most sections without being detected or loud with all the enemies aware of your presence and both affect the number of health items and ammo. The louder one plays, the more they spend clearing a section to move on. The stealth option is best to conserve resources, but is more challenging as players must evade, distract, and takedown foes without arousing suspicion.

Enemy intelligence plays a big role in the difficulty. Whenever a body is discovered or disturbance detected, enemies go on alert to seek you out. They move slow and can surprise you if not careful. Players can also throw objects to coax enemies into an opening for a quiet kill. When engaged in a firefight, some enemies draw fire while others move in from the flanks to finish you off. Both outcomes are dependent on player skill.

Like most post apocalyptic worlds, the resources available are precious and must be exploited for what little worth they have left. The game utilizes a crafting system where health items, knives, and bombs takes a number of components that are worth only a small part of each item, encouraging players to explore levels for every available piece. Upgrade points can also be found to increase the stats of items and player abilities.

The Last of Us 2Last of Us is a tad overrated. At face value, its story and what it does with emotion is no different from an episode of Walking Dead or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Both works are very dark in their subject matter and present a side of the apocalypse genre not often seen. They emphasize the survival element in a dystopic environment and the human cost of what must be done. I believe Last of Us is so revered because it was the first videogame to do what those titles did in their respective mediums.

The emotion comes from the relationship between characters Joel and Ellie. The story is similar to Children of Men where Joel must escort Ellie to a location while trying to stay alive. Outside of cut scenes a lot is learned about who they are through casual interactions. The player will stumble upon a derelict arcade cabinet or the wreckage of an ice cream truck and Ellie will ask Joel what it is. He represents the past, a survivor who has been changed by decades of living in this dystopia, while she is the future, born behind walls, and must learn the ways of the world.

The player controls Joel as Ellie tags along, creating a mentor/student dynamic enhanced by their interactions. The player knows what is going on and what to do, but she remains mostly in the dark. It gets to a point where being separated becomes unnerving, especially with encroaching bandits or infected enemies. It is the implication that is truly dire as when the player dies, Ellie is left alone with those who want to kill her or worse. Eventually she learns to take care of herself, but the devotion remains. For about 12 hours you get to know her and Joel and you do not want the experience to end.

A key element that makes the relationship feel real is the performances. Veteran voice actor Troy Baker assumes a gruff Texas accent for Joel, sounding old and clearly affected by the years of doing what he has to. He has great chemistry with newcomer Ashley Johnson as Ellie, whose performance reminds me of Ellen Page from Juno if the character did not make me want to sterilize the human race. Ellie’s naivete has a major cute factor, but her resilience as a survivor with some semblance of hope and innocence makes her more sympathetic.

The Last of Us 3The Last of Us does what games like Silent Hill 2 used to do. With deep characterization through gameplay and storytelling, we witness the struggle of survival from the perspective of two very different people who come to depend on each other. We feel their anguish, understand their plight, and want to see them overcome the hardships of the apocalypse. If there is any testament that videogames can convey emotion, it is certainly The Last of Us.

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Charles McMillan

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

The Global Barfly’s Companion #19: The Alaska State Fair

21 Monday Sep 2015

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The Global Barfly’s Companion #19 by Benjamin Toche

Venue: The Alaska State Fair

Location:  2075 Glenn Highway, Palmer, AK 99645

ASF1

Alaska recently breached headlines, not for the inane blathering of one time vice presidential candidate and local doofus Sarah Palin, but for President Obama’s visit to the state to discuss boring old climate change. Few outside of the region’s press affiliates bothered to care. Instead, the residents of the 49th state busied their faceholes with one of their favored yearly indulgences: the Alaska State Fair. I set forth into the madness: the crowds and lights and rides and greasy, flash-fried things and, obviously, strong drink.

The fairgrounds occupy a chunk of appropriated farmland next to the railroad tracks that run through Palmer, a sleepy-ish farm town reminiscent of the upper Midwest. Some would call the place idyllic: ringed by jagged mountains, cut by glacial rivers, choked with wildlife. There’s a reason visiting the state is one of those bucket list items. Palmer has a certain charm and for the occasion of the fair, she dons her best act of being true, salt of the earth Americana.

Each time I go to the Alaska State Fair, I’m floored anew by the powerful need for alcohol in order to cope with the enormity of everything here. A 70-pound rutabaga. Pumpkins weighing a half-ton. Llamas. Clanky rides administered by stereotypical carnies. Who can soberly face osuch terror?

The fair does not disappoint.

ASF2

The fair is home to seven watering holes. In the early afternoon, after a rousing set of pig races wherein the combatants were named after fictional characters (e.g., Lord Voldepork), I visit the swankiest of the AK fair’s booze-marts: a log style building that once upon a time was a church. A sign draped over the entrance proclaims the joint, Wine Bar.

The setting is gussied up with gauzy drapes and “art” strung with Christmas lights as if outside it was already descending into evening. Round tables with votive candles in cut-glass jars clutter the center of the main room. Love seats and low coffee tables crowd along the left hand wall. The bar sits to the right and offers a selection of wines from around the globe: Malbecs from Argentina, Riojas from Spain, Chardonnays from Napa, a wholly unexpected Veuve Clicquot – available for only $80 per bottle. Patrons hunch along the bar with long stemmed glasses, swirling and nosing and muttering about their drinks before taking small, appreciative sips. Truly, Wine Bar is not the typical image people conjure when confronted with the scale of Alaska. It’s a strange place, an attempt at culture at an event otherwise devoid of any such pretension.

I take a seat outside. Wrought iron chairs and tables with fat umbrellas sprouting from their centers offer a view of a nearby stage where dancers cavort: flamenco performed by real, and sveltely beautiful Latin Americans followed by pounding cloggers, daughters of hearty farm stock, who jiggle in not an altogether unbeautiful way themselves. The flamenco you’d expect as you nibble at $11/plate dips (white bean, olive tapenade, feta pepper served with warm, sliced baguette), but the cloggers call for an appropriately local microbrew. There are several on tap, along with your characteristically terrible macros, and the Twister Creek IPA from the Denali Brewing Company matches the cloggers’ kitsch perfectly in its crispness. Later, a local lady from Fairbanks seats herself at my table and eats a weird open-face-and-cheese-covered sandwich before she attempts a conversation, which makes me excuse myself in favor of another of my favorite fair boozeries: the beer garden.

ASF3

Housed tabernacle-style in vinyl sheeting, the Oasis Beer Garden offers inside and outside seating. Rigged with green picnic tables and awash with an ambience of frat-boy charm, this place is not antithetical to what Wine Bar strives for, but it’s certainly a leap down the cultural ladder. Patrons mug for photos behind a board painted to resemble a crab fisherman from the “Deadliest Catch” series. There is a gigantic Jenga game, with 2x4s for pieces, operated by some hipsters who stumbled in from the rides that abut Oasis. A lady with a stroller arrives while a busker serenades the crowd with a washboard strapped to his chest.

I take my refuge within the tent. Shrieks issue from the rides, punctuating the general hubbub of machinery and children and their milling parents, shelling out so many dollars for rigged carnival games offering cheaply-made Chinese prizes. In Oasis, all of us drink beers. Coors Light is a popular choice. The clients are studious drinkers, bracing themselves before heading out again.

If Wine Bar was an attempt at culture, Oasis is a filling station. I have a few drinks here: Pumpkin Ale seasonal from the Alaskan Brewing Company and a couple more Twister Creeks. As I start to feel buzzed, the Jenga tower falls for the fifteenth time, startling me anew. I head out into the fair before a stop at the day’s ultimate destination.

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The Sluice Box. Aptly named for that is what happens to bodies here. If Wine Bar was upscale and Oasis was too bro-tier, Sluice Box is the incarnation of what people perceive as real Alaska. Everything here screams ragamuffin and jury rig. The building is squat, ugly: a longhouse with rude wooden columns supporting open A-frame rafters; clapboard exterior but nothing to hide the place’s snaking electrical conduits. A sign above the bar proclaims, IN DOG BEERS I HAVE ONLY HAD ONE.

The barkeeps dress motley, one of them sporting a camouflage blouse about three sizes too large. She dances with her fellow keep, a slow turning step, up and down the bar back, as she waits for the head of my beer to settle. The floor is gravel and a stage at the far end holds a local act, The Voodoo Blues, whose youngish lead singer sports a floral print push-up dress as she belts out soulful tunes to the accompaniment of her crew. She’s either pretty good or passable enough due to the beers I’ve ingested. Doesn’t matter. She’s here. She’s giving it her damnedest.

The Sluice Box is the place where people end up at the fair. It’s where the true believers of Dionysus aggregate at the end of their day. It’s beer on tap and they’re running a special, Heineken $5 a bottle, the cheapest you can get on the grounds. Beverage Enforcement men, stern looking beefy dudes in polos and cargo pants and boots, make sure none of the riff-raff get out of line. A palsied man enters, carrying a cheeseburger, and sits by himself at one of the low picnic tables near the live music. He eats. I watch. Later, he’s joined by an older lady who brings him a beer. He dresses in touristy clothes and an LL Bean hat, but he’s right where he belongs. This is it, and maybe it’s the beer or the dying sun or the lead singer whose pipes just can’t quite reach Robert Plant in “Whole Lotta Love” or the guitarist who doesn’t even try to imitate Page’s signature slide on the same song, but I’m swept with the feeling that this, of all the low down places of the world, is the one to visit at the Alaska State Fair.

Outside is sunset, 10PM-ish. The sky is golden and terrible. The fair begins its rumbling closing activities. I head for home.

ASF5

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Benjamin Toche

Benjamin Toche is an author living in Palmer, Alaska. He reads and writes when not suffering from self-induced psychological and/or interpersonal relationship problems.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #6: The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1995)

20 Sunday Sep 2015

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The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, Tom Stoppard

Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 3

#6: The Fifteen Minute Hamlet (1995)

Tom Stoppard turned Hamlet inside out in his Post-modernization of Shakespeare’s most famous play. The ways in which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are more about us than about Shakespeare or the Elizabethans is mostly subtle, with the suggestion that modernity is an accident of human evolution, and that our fates, and the meaning of our existence, are probably accidental as well. If we are not creators, we are, in some sense, on our way to the gallows in a fog of self.

Stoppard is less subtle in his other version of the Danish prince’s tragedy, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet.

Here, Shakespeare is both an Elizabethan artist at court, and is also, anachronistically, a filmmaker who has accelerated the pace of Hamlet’s story, by ripping out whole pages from the text, in order to make it palatable to his king. The blocking of the scenes is clever, allowing instant transitions between scenes and acts in a barn, and compressing the play down to just the essential ideas, just the essential tropes, just the essential actions. A production of the full text of Hamlet takes about three and half hours, and your average stage version comes in over two—this version comes in under 15 minutes.

To the viewer who doesn’t know the source material, this abbreviated show will likely seem incoherent, the visual logic of the story taking overwhelming precedence over its linguistic and psychological sense. Of course, adapters of Shakespeare worry that such semiotic incoherence is precisely how his plays will be experienced by a general public that has been so coddled by Hollywood spectacle and narratives that even those asleep in comas can follow.

At the same time, few productions attempt the whole Hamlet, because three and a half hours (or nearly four with an intermission) is even more Shakespeare than Shakespeareans can want to see in one sitting. In this sense, all productions of Shakespeare are a remix.

In The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, the king sees a preview, and is dismissive of the product. Shakespeare goes back to the editing booth, and cuts the fifteen-minute Hamlet in half, to enthusiastic royal and popular approval. The playwright is quietly mystified, but is nonetheless proud that his jittery remix is somehow a smash.

Have I mentioned that The Fifteen Minute Hamlet is wickedly fucking funny?

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

Episode 171: A Craft Discussion About Borges’s This Craft of Verse, with Vanessa Blakeslee!

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Poetry

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Jared Silvia, Jorge Luis Borges, Peet Seeger, This Craft of Verse, Vanessa Blakeslee

Episode 171 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I talk about Jorge Luis Borges’s This Craft of Verse with Vanessa Blakeslee,

Photo by Ashley Inguanta.

Photo by Ashley Inguanta.

plus Jared Silvia performs Peter Seger’s “Hobo’s Lullaby.”

Jared 1

TEXTS DISCUSSED

This Craft of Verse

7 Notebooks

NOTES

Check out the great perks for The Drunken Odyssey’s fundraiser here.

Jared Shirt

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Episode 171 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

The Curator of Schlock #104: The Substitute 2

18 Friday Sep 2015

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The Curator of Schlock #104 by Jeff Shuster

The Substitute 2: School’s Out

(There is no substitute for Tom Berenger.)

S2A

Okay, I think I’m going to have to temporarily change my title of Curator of Schlock to Curator of Made for Video Movies. Do you think The Substitute 2: School’s Out made it to theaters? I don’t think so! I can’t imagine watching this thing on an IMAX screen. Imagine 72 feet of Treat Williams

S2D

Yeah, we get Treat Williams this time instead of Tom Berenger. I have to say that I don’t know if this is an improvement or not. Tom Berenger was in Oliver Stone’s Platoon and he was especially scary as Sgt. Barnes screaming, “Take the pain! Take the pain!” to one of the new recruits that gets shot. Treat Williams isn’t scary. He played the dad on the CW’s Everwood, a family drama. No, he’s not particularly scary. Yeah, he played the villain in that Phantom movie with Billy Zane, but he’s just too low energy to play a villain or a hardcore mercenary.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Treat Williams. I’d go on a fishing trip with him. He seems pleasant enough. It looks like he’s starred in other movies, too. Let’s see. Oh, he was in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. That movie made no sense to me. Was the whole thing an opium dream?

S2E(1)

If it was, how could De Niro’s character predict what the future would like? I got the extra long version that starred the actress who played Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and that evil alien Pope on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She played some cemetery proprietor bugging De Niro in the cemetery. I forget what she was bugging him about. Was the whole thing an opium dream? The movie makes no sense.

Oh. I guess I need to get around to discussing The Substitute 2: School’s Out at some point in this review. I like the credit sequence. You see a bunch of chalkboards flying around screen done to a cover of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out for Summer. I guess they had to jazz up the Alice Cooper classic for the Jamba Juice generation. Hey, at least they got the rights to the song.

This movie is like the first Substitute, but instead cocaine being trafficked out of the school by the principal, we have an illegal chop shop being organized by the shop teacher! Who knew?

S2B

B.D. Wong plays the shop teacher. He also played the geneticist in Jurassic Park, and more importantly, he played the geneticist in Jurassic World, the best movie of the summer! Pterodactyls were attacking the park guests! It was wonderful.

S2C

John King tells me B.D. Wong played Song in the original production of M. Butterfly, a play written by David Henry Hwang and the psychologist on Law and Order.

Anyway, Treat Williams stabs B.D. Wong in the stomach with a rusty pipe putting an end to his reign of terror. What else happened in the movie? Treat Williams smashed a student’s orange soda bottle with a yo-yo. That was neat. I just need thirteen more words to get to 500 and I’m done!

 

Five Things I Learned from The Substitute 2 School’s Out

  1. When you ask carjackers to peacefully hand over their guns, they tend to shoot you.
  2. Bring enough orange soda for the rest of the class!
  3. A yo-yo is a deadly weapon.
  4. M&Ms are a deadly weapon.
  5. A light bulb is a deadly weapon.

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Photo by Leslie Salas

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

McMillan’s Codex #4: Wolfenstein (New Order)

16 Wednesday Sep 2015

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McMillan’s Codex #4 by C.T. McMillan

Wolfenstein: New Order

Wolfenstein New Order

The alternate history genre works well in videogames if done right. The Fallout series is probably the best example with its 1950s post-apocalyptic, atom-punk aesthetic. Though the world may be well constructed and full of depth, players can only suspend their disbelief for so long before they realize the DC Wasteland is an impossible place of impossible things. In literature, the trick to making fiction believable is using elements consistent with reality. To that affect, Wolfenstein: New Order takes the Third Reich and brings it into a hellish world of the 1960s.

Good gameplay is as essential as a well-crafted world. New Order achieves a balance between the two by going back to basics. While employing modern tropes of one-button grenades, iron-sights, lean, and slide, the mechanics are as old school as one can get. The player can carry more than three weapons, use two at once, and each has an alternate mode. The gameplay is shooter-oriented with the player’s movement brisk and smooth and the objectives as simple: kill everything that is not you. It also does away with quick time events and trusts the player to know what to do in certain situations. By simplifying and disregarding modern conventions, there is still enough gameplay for the player to enjoy while keeping focus on the world.

WNO1Unlike most World War 2 shooters, New Order is less about the war and more about its aftermath if the Nazis had won. A part of borrowing actual people and events from history is a level of honesty. One cannot pick and choose what they want unless it can exist outside the whole, and you cannot have Nazis without racism, supremacy, and the Holocaust. New Order does not pull any punches in its portrayal of the Third Reich while building a world with obvious dark allusions to fiction and history.

The Man in the High Castle

Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle and Robert Harris’s Fatherland are the best-known examples of alternate World War 2 history.

Fatherland

Both involve the Nazis winning the war and show the life of occupation on a global scale. Oppression affects society as the people are monitored with surveillance technology, threatened with violence, and controlled with misinformation. They openly submit to authority, their culture replaced by a police state of uniformed monotony prevalent throughout New Order. Furthermore, the game takes many liberties with the Nazi’s more fringe concepts for architecture and weapons.

WNO2Right after the prologue, the game’s portrayal of Nazi violence becomes clear. It starts in a mental institution where soldiers take patients for experiments before executing the rest. The killing is casual as one soldier walks about the patients’ beds with a pistol like it is a menial task. The regime’s conquest of America, its treatment of other countries, and its war in Africa that has devastated the wildlife can be learned in conversations and memos. In a sewer level, the player overhears a concerned citizen reporting her neighbor’s son to the police for wearing his mother’s clothes. In one chapter, the player is sent to a concentration camp to rescue a Jewish engineer. The depiction of the Holocaust is respectful while unflinching as people are marched to the furnace by the hundreds while a minority is worked to death in horrid conditions.

New Order’s genre allows it to take undeveloped ideas from history and make them a reality. Never is that more prevalent than in level design. Inspired by Nazi architect Albert Speer, buildings are modeled after Hitler’s vision of a world in cold concrete. Familiar cities bare the Nazi’s touch, dotted with statues locked at attention, arms extended while flags flutter in the wind. In Berlin, standing highest among featureless towers is the Volkshalle, a dome so large the breath of its occupants causes the interior to rain. It was to be Hitler’s symbol of triumph had construction come to fruition.

No shooter is without its weapons and New Order takes a note from the Wunderwaffe, a Nazi research and development program responsible for the creation of rockets, the jet engine, and other obscure ideas. The standard assault rifle is a direct parallel to the Sturmgewehr. The Horten 2-29, the first stealth fighter ever developed, is seen flying about shooting Allied planes. In one chapter on the Moon, a memo tells of an orbital weapon called the Sonnengewehr that could focus the light of the sun to burn cities. And yes, that was also a real thing.

WNO3Wolfenstein: New Order uses the immersive properties of videogames to create an impossible reality. Believing our planet could ruled by such evil can be hard to fathom without the hard work and extensive research of developers. This unsettling game stands an achievement in world building, and reaffirms that shooting Nazis, even future Nazis, is awesome.

_______

Charles McMillan

C.T. McMillan (Episode 169) is a film critic and devout gamer.  He has a Bachelors for Creative Writing in Entertainment from Full Sail University.

The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #5: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990)

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film 2

#5: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1990)

Tom Stoppard is a great playwright, a British postmodernist who well knows how literary meaning is culturally constructed. His play and film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (1990) are wonderful accomplishments that construe the comedy team of Hamlet’s bumbling college friends as the hapless heroes of the story, as if Beckett were feeling more chipper and rewriting Hamlet with Didi and Gogo from Waiting for Godot. (Or Eliot, who in “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock imagines himself not as the tragic hero, but merely someone to swell a progress”—except Stoppard is wickedly funny, whereas Eliot never was).

R & G

Stoppard’s film “adaptation” of Hamlet consists of more new material than Shakespeare’s original play, since the scenes not featuring tend to happen elliptically, in the background of R & G’s points-of-view. When the original text is enacted, the scenes come off as flat, as if their familiarity as set-pieces makes them odd, as if R & G can only guess their roles.

R & G 2

Iaian Glen (who plays Jorah Morment, always pining for his Khaleesi on Game of Thrones) looks like he is 19 years old as Hamlet, and does nothing wrong as an actor, except he never quite takes in R & G as being alive. Neither does Donald Sumpter as Claudius. R & G are interchangeable to the court.

rg3y

Or maybe it’s to indicate our own overexposure to this Freudian tragedy, or Stoppard’s weariness with it, as a playwright contending with this warhorse. Or maybe it is to drive the point home that we are R & G, and their vivid confusion in this grand narrative of someone else is our lot. (It’s just like life, really.)

Rosencrantz-Guildenstern-Are-Dead-2

Tim Roth and Gary Oldman are priceless as the titular comic characters, questioning their existence and purpose—with brilliant obtuseness—all the way to the gallows. They are like Laurel and Hardy on hash, with a spot of Monty Python tossed in. Gary Oldman is the vulnerable, Stan Laurel type. Tim Roth is the alpha of these two fools.

Rosencrantz___Guildenstern_Are_Dead__1990_4

The other remarkable performance in this story is the bombastic, elusive, and debased lead player, as played with astute panache by Richard Dreyfuss. His refrain about his own low standards, and the necessity of pleasing the awful tastes of audiences, is “Times being what they are…”

He is now, of course.

We are left to ask, along with the creature of Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird,” “what to make of a diminished thing”? An astounding lot, actually.

_______

1flip

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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